Once upon a time, there was a program at Brown called semiotics. Robert Scholes, an English professor, was hired to teach at Brown in 1970, arriving on College Hill to discover a “campus whose openness to new lines of teaching and research would make it the perfect incubator for these new ideas,” according to a 2004 article from the Boston Globe. It was the perfect site upon which to build a program for the study of semiotics — a branch of English and linguistics which views language through the lens of signs and symbols, aiming to decode and translate them. When it arrived on College Hill, the field lay very much at the fringes of academia.
The program was a monument to the promise of theoretical humanities and of the value of pursuing nontraditional education philosophies at the collegiate level. Thanks to a donation from a particularly successful Brown semiotics graduate, the program was folded into a newly founded Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996. In the time since, the methods of semiotics have come to be widely accepted and utilized. Film and media courses are practically synonymous now with emphasizing the symbolism and subliminal messaging in the content they examine, a method which was the core methodology of the semiotics program at Brown.
As the discipline has become standard issue, however, Brown as a whole has hedged its bets, cutting down on smaller departments which operate within the intellectual lineage of semiotics to ensure the degrees handed out will be socially acceptable and easily applicable. The overtaking of the semiotics program, and the lack of experimental educational programming to replace it, are symbols of a University that has lost its nerve, and desperately needs to get it back.
Graduates of the program have brought a host of unique and exciting projects to the world. “This American Life” co-creator Ira Glass ’82 was famously a semiotics concentrator during his time on College Hill. Before winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Jeffrey Eugenides ’82 P’22 took classes in the semiotics program, as did Academy Award-nominee Todd Haynes ’85. The program was not developed or executed for the purposes of churning out well-qualified job candidates. Instead, in placing such a high emphasis on the theoretical, on pushing the bounds of knowledge, it attracted students seeking innovation in their education and trained them to see the world through a unique and ever-changing vantage point. Prioritizing discovery in education yielded a crop of alums uniquely suited to create new structures, not simply fill roles already outlined for them.
Once described as a “cult-like” program with only a few professors even at its peak, a semiotics program that refused to center itself around a particular career was a risk, but one which yielded highly malleable and creative alums who found success in distinct fields. It’s a risk the University no longer seems willing to take.
The last major shakeup Brown made in its educational divisions was establishing the Watson School of International and Public Affairs in 2025. Before that it was their 2013 move to transition the Department of Community Health into an independent School of Public Health. Before that, in 2010, the Division of Engineering became an independent School of Engineering. They are all no doubt valuable and beneficial additions to a Brown education, but they are also by no means unique. They’re testaments to the game of catch-up Brown is playing, allocating its resources to mirroring departments of other universities while announcing plans to cut down on staff for some of the smallest departments and programs. Instead, faculty and administrative resources are being directed toward explicitly preprofessional online master’s programs which spit in the face of all that semiotics stood for.
Were semiotics in its infancy now, all signs point to a program that would be culled or reigned in before it had the chance to make a mark. That’s a problem.
The MCM department still offers the first ever semiotics film course, MCM 0260: “Cinematic Coding and Narrativity,” and more unlikely offerings like MCM 0700E: “Introduction to DJ Culture.” But where the program it absorbed was once notorious for discovering a discipline, it is now more or less seen as a film department by another name. As former Professor of Modern Culture and Media Mary Ann Doane put it in an interview with the Globe, MCM students “don’t feel themselves so much involved in the birth of a field, (as much as they) see themselves as coming and having to master a discipline that’s already in place.”
If nothing else, the name semiotics calls back to a time when Brown was determined to be on the forefront of educational theory and practices. As it stands, the subliminal message I get from the school’s course offerings and concentration plans is that college is about catching up to whatever knowledge is already floating around out there. A Brown education seems built to graduate students with a degree which will, at best, give them a mastery of a clearly outlined discipline, and at worst put them on equal footing with any other graduate from any other school.
Where semiotics ought to be a featured testament to all that is right with Brown, it has instead been relegated to a footnote. While Brown cuts staffing in smaller programs, it more and more assimilates its students to the expectations of the professional world. You don’t have to be a semiotician to see the message the symbol sends, and you don’t have to be a fringe academic to know it’s the wrong one.
Oscar Noxon ’27 can be reached at oscar_noxon@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
